A Look Around Curiosity

A Look Around Curiosity

Here’s a look around Curiosity, or the Mars Science Laboratory on Mars. For two minutes you can look around the scene by using the arrows at the top left of the video or just “clicking and dragging” your way around. Running out of time is no problem just replay the video (or whatever you would call this).

The scene is from a location called Murray Buttes and most of the features are labeled. The rover is not visible in this MastCam product.

For scale The dark, flat-topped mesa seen to the left of the rover’s arm is about 50 feet (about 15 meters) high and, near the top, about 200 feet (about 60 meters) wide according to NASA.

I was looking at the panorama and thought how completely quiet it must be up there and what it would sound like to try and get an echo off the buttes. The echo time lag of course depends on the speed of sound on Mars. Looking around on the web quickly reveals the speed of sound on Mars is about 244.4 m/s or 801.3 ft/s compared to 340 m/sec or 1115 ft/sec on Earth. So the echo would take nearly 25 percent longer to return on Mars than on Earth.